Robert Downey Sr.s freshman film Babo 73 (1964) was a vulgar satire with a focus on American government that would broadly mark the course his erratic career would follow. Chafed Elbows (1966) prompted Jonas Mekas to make a typically polemical comparison between Downey and subversive comedian Lenny Bruce. However, 1969's Putney Swope won the director a wide audience.
Opening with the board of a gung-ho advertising agency accidentally electing their token black member to the chair and continuing to log the consequent corporate history of ' Truth and Soul Inc.' Putney Swope offers ample scope for Downey's satire and the pandemonium crescendos as his targets range way beyond consumerism and racism. In the trend for overblown, bad-taste comedy, Downey was able to at last get his foot in the Hollywood door with the Mad Magazine presentation of Up the Academy (1980).